Everyman and the Parable of the Talents

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SOURCE: Kolve, V. A. “Everyman and the Parable of the Talents.” In Medieval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual, edited by Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson, pp. 316-40. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972.

[In the following essay, Kolve considers the Parable of the Talents as a possible source for some of the topics discussed in Everyman.]

Many scholars at work over several decades have done much to discover the sources of Everyman. We have learned that it owes something to the traditions of the Dance of Death, to confessional manuals, to treatises on the art of holy dying, to a medieval schema that divides all human endowments into gifts of Nature, Fortune, and Grace; and most important of all, we have been shown its likeness to a testing-of-friends story (Buddhist in origin) that appears first shaped to a Christian moral in the Greek Barlaam and Ioasaph of the eleventh century. A. C. Cawley, in his edition of the play, summarized and significantly extended those enquiries.1 Though I shall propose in this paper a new and more inclusive way of describing the play's central concerns, I have no wish to forsake any of this genealogy of relationship already established. The literary kindred of the play called Everyman are as numerous as the centrality of its subject would suggest. That subject is nothing less than man's dying and doom.

But there remain a number of things unexplained and unaccounted for. Scholarship has passed over in silence some facts that bulk very large. Consider, for example, the way the title page names the central action:

Here begynneth a treatyse how the hye Fader of heuen sendeth Dethe to somon euery creature to come and gyue a-counte of theyr lyues in this worlde / and is in maner of a morall playe.

Notice that the play is not entitled “A treatyse how a man shulde lerne dye,” or “… how a man his trewe frendes may knowe,” or “… what be yiftes of Kynde, Fortune, and Grace,” though such formulas are what a careful reading of the scholarship surrounding the play might lead one to expect. The audience will of course learn something about all three subjects—as titles, none would be wholly misleading—but they were not what the printer or the dramatist thought the play was about: that they defined instead as a summons to ready and render accounts.

The playing-text indeed makes necessary that description. The words “reckoning” and “account” occur (in varying grammatical forms) more than twenty-five times in the play, often together, and always at moments of high urgency, where most meaning is being gathered in fewest words.2 I propose to give them some close attention, and wish to begin with two summary foreclosures. First of all, we must not ascribe this language to the dramatist's unique invention, to the particular poetry of his play; as will be seen, it is language very common in relation to the Doom.3 And more important, we must not confuse this summons to an accounting with the sublime image of Revelations 20:12, 15:

And I saw the dead, great and small, standing in the presence of the throne. And the books were opened; and another book was opened, which was the book of life. And the dead were judged by those things which were written in the books, according to their works. … And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the pool of fire.

(Douay translation)

We must not confuse these images, though I suspect many have. These books are kept in heaven, they are part of a mystery. Everyman, in strong contrast, must bring with him his own account book—it is a literal stage property—and his urgent task is to ready and “clere” it. His greatest concern is, in terms of sources, in no way indebted to the high mystery of Apocalypse, but is instead a thing smaller, humbler, more precise.4 God orders Everyman to “bring with hym a sure rekenynge” (l. 70).

The search for a possible source for this action will be made easier if we note how closely it is related to another recurring theme of the play: the notion that life and goods are “lent,” not given. Everyman is forced to confront that sad truth at several crucial moments of loss,5 in exchanges like the following:

DETHE:
What, wenest thou thy lyue is gyuen the,
And thy worldely gooddes also?
EVERYMAN:
I had wende so, veryle.
DETHE:
Nay, nay, it was but lende the. …

(ll. 161-64)

Later, as his understanding grows, Everyman will recount his duty in that same way:

Of all my workes I must shewe
How I haue lyued and my dayes spent;
Also of yll dedes that I haue vsed
In my tyme, syth lyfe was me lent. …

(ll. 338-44)

Words like “reckoning,” “account-making,” “lending,” and “spending,” compose the essential verbal matrix of the play; and the account book Everyman brings with him is the emblem of their interrelationship. It is what the play most urgently concerns.

A fifteenth-century English poet in the act of contemplating the nearness of his own death offers evidence that such an association of ideas is not novel and can furnish a clue to its ultimate source. John Lydgate, in his Testament, writes:

Age is crope In, calleth me to my grave,
To make rekenyng how I my tyme haue spent,
Baryne of vertu, allas, who shall me saue,
Fro fendes daunger tacounte for my talent,
But Iesu be my staf and my potent,
Ouerstreite audite is like tencombre me,
Or dome be youen, but mercy be present
To all that knele to Iesu on ther kne.(6)

The only important word in this verse not found in Everyman, other than those suggesting an advanced old age, is the word “talent.” But where that word occurs, these others occur also. And where these others occur but the word “talent” is missing, it is, I shall argue, the necessary explanation of them. The parable which gives meaning to Lydgate's verse furnishes for Everyman also an intellectual structure just below the surface of the play, and from it many of the play's characters, the most distinctive part of its language, and the logic of its total action derive. It is less a new “source” for Everyman, than the source behind the sources: the covered logic of an action that made that action coherent and inevitable. Interrelationships between medieval texts are sometimes so complex that it is possible to name those nearest and most like without having looked at the most important of all.

Because it will be our steady concern in what follows, I wish to set out here the parable of the talents, entire, as it is found in Matthew 25:14-30:

For even as a man going into a far country called his servants and delivered to them his goods;


And to one he gave five talents, and to another two, and to another one, to everyone according to his proper ability; and immediately he took his journey.


And he that had received five talents went his way and traded with the same and gained other five.


And in like manner he that had received the two gained other two.


But he that had received the one, going his way, digged into the earth and hid his lord's money.


But after a long time the lord of those servants came and reckoned with them.


And he that had received the five talents, coming, brought other five talents, saying: Lord, thou didst deliver to me five talents. Behold, I have gained other five over and above.


His lord said to him: Well done, good and faithful servant, because thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will place thee over many things. Enter thou into the joy of thy lord.


And he also that had received the two talents came and said: Lord, thou deliveredst two talents to me. Behold, I have gained other two.


His lord said to him: Well done, good and faithful servant, because thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will place thee over many things. Enter thou into the joy of thy lord.


But he that had received the one talent came and said: Lord, I know that thou art a hard man; thou reapest where thou hast not sown and gatherest where thou has not strewed.


And, being afraid, I went and hid thy talent in the earth. Behold, here thou hast that which is thine.


And his lord answering said to him: Wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sow not and gather where I have not strewed.


Thou oughtest therefore to have committed my money to the bankers; and at my coming I should have received my own with usury.


Take ye away therefore the talent from him and give it him that hath ten talents.


For to everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall abound: but, from him that hath not, that also which he seemeth to have shall be taken away.


And the unprofitable servant cast ye out into the exterior darkness. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

(Douay translation)

Any modern commentator will tell you that a talent was originally a unit of weight which became also a unit of monetary value, its precise worth depending on the metal it measured. But that clarifies only the literal sense of the parable. The talents are obviously used here as a figure of speech, as a way of talking about something else. Indeed, it is only because Christ used them to talk about something else that the word “talent” is current still. Its present signification descends from the glosses of the Fathers concerning Christ's real subject, and therefore stands now for natural endowment, ability, capacity. It does so in French, Italian, Spanish, and English.

Though this text from Matthew will be our chief concern, it is not possible to separate it entirely from two other parables which also concern talents loaned or placed in trust—not possible, because medieval writers and preachers did not always distinguish between them. One is the version offered by Luke 19:12-27, differing in some details but clearly an alternate account of the same teaching. The other is found in Matthew 18, beginning at the twenty-third verse:

Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened to a king who would take an account of his servants.


And, when he had begun to take the account, one was brought to him that owed him ten thousand talents.


And, as he had not wherewith to pay it, his lord commanded that he should be sold, and his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made.


But that servant falling down besought him, saying: Have patience with me and I will pay thee all.

The king has pity and releases him from his debt. The servant later chances to meet a man who owes him a hundred pence in turn. He demands an immediate settlement, and when the other pleads his inability to pay, the king's servant has him thrown into prison. The king, hearing of this, summons his servant again, charges him with his failure to forgive as he himself had been forgiven, and delivers him to torturers until the debt be paid.

This parable is entirely separate from the other two, but I mention it now because it also bears an important relationship to Everyman, and because the word “talent” links all three parables in ways medieval authors were not always concerned to keep separate. The parable from Matthew 25, however, is much the most important—for its narrative power, its richer detail, the greater significance of its surrounding matter (the wise and foolish virgins precede it, the corporal deeds of mercy follow), and perhaps as a result of all the above, the greater patristic attention paid it over the course of several centuries. It would be worth our present attention if only to explain the play's central figure, a man summoned to render account of goods lent him for a time and now recalled. But in fact its importance for Everyman is far more extensive in ways patristic commentary on the parable alone can make clear. I wish to suggest some of those ways, one instance at a time.

Let me begin with the desertions—that movement-into-aloneness generic to tragedy which is here represented by the betrayals of Felawship, Kynrede, and Goodes, and later by the departure of Beaute, Strength, Dyscrecion, and V. Wyttes. The tale of the man who has three friends, two of whom betray him in his greatest need (a tale existing in numerous versions and many languages, deriving ultimately from Barlaam and Ioasaph), has long been recognized as a source of this action. Everyman does test his friends and some of them bear names deriving from prose moralizations of that story. The first friend is most frequently explained as standing for Riches, or the World; the second as figuring Wife and Kindred (sometimes including Friends); and the third friend, too little loved but alone faithful, is named Good Deeds, or Charity, or Christ. The relationship is close and vital. But on its own it is not enough. These analogues offer no help in accounting for the second set of desertions, the second tragic movement of the play. For those, we are accustomed to refer to the ars moriendi, which does indeed concern the experience of death, but in ways a good deal less physical and interior than the play's second part.7 The ars, it is true, does speak of wife and children and riches as temptations to a dying man, for he is likely to turn to them for help, uselessly, and in ways ultimately dangerous to his soul. But, in terms of literary genetics, that is merely to account again for some features already provided by the three-friends story. The subject of the ars moriendi is emphatically not the physical process of dying: it insists that in the moment of extremity only spiritual matters are worth attention. In short, these two sources between them can account for Felawship, Kynrede, Cosyn, Goodes, Good Dedes. A great deal, but not all. The parable of the talents and patristic commentary upon it, in strong contrast, can furnish us not only with the central figure of a man summoned to a reckoning, and with the characters just named, but also with those characters excluded so far: Beaute, Strength, Dyscrecion, V. Wyttes, Knowledge, and even Confessyon. It does so in two different ways.

The first way, and the more generally inclusive, is developed by those commentaries that work from the idea of talents per se, ignoring (as does the Gospel of Luke) the 5-2-1 numerology of Matthew. This tradition goes back at least as far as Saint John Chrysostom in the fourth century,8 but I shall quote from the vastly more influential statement of it made by Gregory the Great at the end of his brilliant homily on the parable—a version incorporated by Rabanus Maurus into his own eight-book commentary on Matthew written some two centuries later.9 Gregory writes:

There is no-one who can truly say: I have received no talent at all, there is nothing about which I can be required to give a reckoning. For even the very smallest of gifts will be charged as a talent to the account of every poor man. For one man has received understanding [intelligentia] and owes the ministry of preaching by reason of that talent. Another has received earthly goods, and owes alms-giving from his talent, out of his property. Another has received neither understanding of inner things [internorum intelligentia] nor wealth of worldly goods [rerum affluentia], but he has learned an art or skill by which he lives, and this very skill is charged to his account as the receiving of a talent. Another has acquired none of these things, but nevertheless has perhaps come to be on terms of friendship [familiaritas] with a rich man; he has therefore received the talent of friendship. So if he does not speak to him on behalf of the poor, he is condemned for not using his talent … [etc.].10

Already this could suggest to a dramatist the characters Knowledge, Goodes, Felawship. And in his insistence that the very smallest of gifts—those common even to the poor—must be recognized as talents and put out to use, Gregory may be taken to imply that humbler inventory that Chrysostom had named earlier:

For the talents here are each person's ability, whether in the way of protection, or in money, or in teaching, or in what thing soever of the kind. … For this end God gave us speech, and hands, and feet, and strength of body, and mind, and understanding. …11

Here Strength makes a separate appearance, and Dyscrecion [mind] as well, to single out only those not already named in the passage from Gregory. A commentary long attributed to the Venerable Bede, but actually based on Rabanus, concludes its exposition of the parable by emphasizing this same kind of open-ended applicability, as I suppose any of us would if we were asked (without preparation) to suggest its general meaning: “These things may be interpreted in many ways as concerning charity, ability and knowledge.” The Glossa ordinaria instructs in a similar mode: “Note that what is given to each one in worldly or spiritual things is charged to his account, as the talent for which he will have to give a reckoning when the Lord returns.”12

But patristic tradition can offer further and more particular help, for the numbers in Matthew also invited theological speculation. A 5-2-1 progression, with its multiples, necessarily exercised the imagination of a culture that thought numbers one of the hidden languages of God. Because no number in Scripture could be without spiritual meaning, however enigmatic, several explanations were made over the course of centuries. The earliest known to me, that of Saint Hilary of Poitiers from the mid-fourth century, is especially concerned with how the Gentiles won the inheritance promised the Jews. The servant who received five talents is read as a figure for those people of the Law who received the five books of Moses and who doubled that trust by the faith of the Gospel, recognizing the sacraments as having been foreshadowed in the Law. Because those persons thereby fulfill the commandments in a new way, they are justified by both Law and faith. These are, I take it, the Jews who accept Christ, of whom the apostles themselves stand as first exemplars.

Hilary interprets the servant who received two talents as standing for those people of the Gentiles who have faith in their heart and confess by their mouth that Christ is Lord—a capacity for inner faith and public witness are the two talents, which they double by good works, authenticating their faith through action. It is with reference to them that the unprofitable servant charges his master with reaping where he has not sown, for the final harvest is here foreseen to be mostly of the Gentiles, instead of the seed of Abraham, to whom the Messiah was promised. The first servant offers works doubled by faith; the second servant, faith doubled by deeds.

And the third servant, it follows, must typify the Jews still living in darkness, rejecting Christ and his Gospel, carnal in their understanding, thinking to be justified by the Law alone. The teaching of Christ they hid in the earth, neither using it themselves nor wishing others to use it. And their fate will be terrible: “For to them that have the use of the Gospels, even the honor of the Law is given; but from him that has not the faith of Christ, even the honor which he seems to have of the Law will be taken away.”13

This early version of the parable's meaning is without consequence for Everyman, as is part of another tradition, rather closely allied, summarized by Rabanus Maurus so: “The first servant, in being given five talents, received the five books of the Law, which, by the doctrine and fulfillment of the ten commandments, he increased. The second, in being given the two talents, received the two Testaments, and these, in a moral and mystical sense, he doubled by piously spreading their teaching abroad. The third, in the likeness of one talent, received the gift of grace, but he hid it in earthly pleasures, and was therefore cast into hell, for he produced no profit from it.”14 Such a reading of the two talents is not uncommon, and the interpretation of the single talent as grace buried in earthly pleasures has some obvious bearing on Everyman. But a tradition descending from Saint Jerome is another matter altogether, more useful to preachers concerned with the moral lives of their parishioners, more widely disseminated and influential, and more steadily illuminating for our play. In his longer commentary on Matthew, Jerome explains that the five talents are to be understood as the five senses—sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch—which are exactly equivalent to the character V. Wyttes in Everyman; that the two talents are to be understood as intelligentia et opera, which almost as certainly furnish us the characters Knowledge and Good Dedes (his context suggests an affirmative, not neutral, meaning for both terms); and that the one talent is to be understood as ratio alone, which I take to be synonymous with the character Dyscrecion. This version of the numbers was transmitted by Isidore of Seville in his Allegoriae quaedam sacrae scripturae and thence by Rabanus Maurus in his De universo.15

One of the identifications I have just made demands fuller and more careful statement, for it addresses one of the most difficult questions in Everyman scholarship. Namely, is the character Knowledge to be understood in something like our modern sense of that term [scientia, intelligentia]? Or does it stand instead for the even then rarer, and now archaic, medieval sense of “acknowledge,” naming that part of the sacrament of penance which concerns a full confession of sins? The latter sense was first proposed in 1947 by H. de Vocht, and has since been skillfully supported by several others. It is an attractive idea, and I was once persuaded by it; but close attention to the morphology of the word in our text, where it occurs only as a noun, never as a verb, and—more to the present point—evidence from patristic commentary on the parable of the talents, both suggest the older and simpler answer is probably correct.16 Good Dedes and Knowledge are linked in the play as intimately as are opera and intelligentia in explanations of the two talents given the second servant. Indeed, the tradition just named, that of Jerome, Isidore, and Rabanus, can help a good deal in clarifying the relationship of certain allegorical characters in the play to others closely allied. The gift of the five senses (V. Wyttes) is defined by them as a knowledge of external things, that is, the receiving of sense data. Reason (Dyscrecion) separates us from the beasts, and comprises the ability to interpret such data. And Knowledge in its turn is the product of reason working perfectly upon sense data: reason not blinded by earthly concerns, not stupidly tenacious of the literal, but seeking instead the spiritual truth that lies hidden within all phenomena.17 In Everyman it is clear, I think, that Knowledge exemplifies this deepest kind of understanding. As a character, she has knowledge of Confession and its efficacy, and is a useful guide to it; but she speaks many other truths as well.

The parable of the talents, then, can explain the figure of Everyman as a man summoned to render accounts; and, better than the more immediately proximate sources, it offers a comprehensive rationale for the other dramatis personae, both interior and exterior, whom he confronts in the course of this action. It also offers help in what must be always one of the crucial tasks of criticism: the attempt to define with maximum precision what happens within a work of art.

For instance, there is another group of words closely associated in the play, and nearly as insistently central as those concerned with “accounts” and “reckoning.” More than twenty-five times, the words “pylgrymage,” “vyage,” or “iourney” occur, and these, too, despite their linguistic weight, have never had any close attention.18 Perhaps this is because the idea of pilgrimage as a figure for all human life was so common in the Middle Ages; even now it seems to require no glossing. Besides, Everyman goes on a journey before our eyes, from one friend to another and finally into the grave. But again, as with Everyman's account book, if that is the explanation of the scholarly silence, then I think that we have mistaken the matter, conflating two metaphors allied but separate, only one of which is really at the center of the play. The pilgrimage in question is not that “of human life”—in the manner of The Canterbury Tales or The Castle of Perseverance or Deguilleville's Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine. That pilgrimage has been underway since Everyman's birth and is hardly spoken of here. It does not add up to news, or require a message of command. The errand assigned to Dethe,

Go thou to Eueryman
And shewe hym, in my name,
A pylgrymage he must on hym take,

(ll. 66-68)

employs a different metaphor, and concerns a new contingency in a life already at the full. In the pilgrimage of life, Everyman's friends have been his constant companions, but in this new and “longe” journey, their constancy is at an end. The latter is, quite simply, the death-journey of the soul to Judgment—Deguilleville's Le Pèlerinage de l'âme—and most of the play is devoted to showing the soul freeing itself from earth so that it can depart. That brief and final action—a swift and simple journey upwards—alone is the pilgrimage suddenly ordained and so inadequately prepared for. The angel describes it so:

Come, excellente electe spouse, to Iesu!
Here aboue thou shalte go

Now shalte thou in to the heuenly spere,
Vnto the whiche all ye shall come
That lyueth well before the daye of dome.

(ll. 894-901)

That journey was first made by Christ in his ascension, and to it the parable of the talents was always understood to refer in its opening words: Sicut enim homo peregre proficiscens … (Matthew) or Homo quidam nobilis abiit in regionem longinquam … (Luke)—(Englished by the Wyclif Bible, “Sothely as a man goynge fer in pilgrimage,” and “Sum noble man wente in to a fer cuntree …”).19 According to the Fathers, Christ used the terms peregre and in regionem longinquam because he was foretelling his ascension in the flesh. The mystery of the Incarnation, in which God united himself with man's kind forever, made his long journey also a pilgrimage, for that word, in the Bible as well as in countless medieval texts, has about it always the suggestion of exile, of finding oneself in a country foreign and potentially hostile. The soul's true home is heaven, but the flesh will go there a stranger and afraid.

I would not wish to claim, in the absence of these other relationships, that Everyman's use of pilgrimage as a metaphor for the soul-journey need be explained by reference to the parable of the talents. It was available in many other places. But the fact is that the parable, which is necessary on other grounds, does make those words available, uses them as a part of its vital meaning, and may therefore help account for their great frequency and importance in the play: the pilgrimage of Everyman's soul recapitulates the first of Christ's journeys in the parable. What can easily seem to us the “longe journey”—all those desperate wanderings in the platea, the search for companionship into the grave—is really born of the allegorical mode itself, that same formal and artistic necessity that also fragments a man's personality and experience of life into two sets of “friends.” Its purpose is merely to disentangle, to make consecutive, spatial, and linear, the extremely complex process of how a man dies. Each stage of human dying—that mysterious transition from being to apparent nonbeing—is rendered as a separate event, but its real-life referent may of course be much shorter or much longer. The duration of the play need represent barely more than the moment of death itself, when light and life fade together, though it must be long enough for a motion of contrition within the soul and for the receiving of sacraments on one's deathbed. The desertions—friends, kin, goods, beauty, strength, the five senses—are in some sense simultaneous, for none of these is utterly and irretrievably lost until they are lost altogether, at the moment of extinction. To separate them is simply to make the totality of that loss more readily apprehensible by the mind and the imagination. But the Everyman specific to this play is possibly youthful and certainly no more than in his prime (“O Dethe, thou comest whan I had thee leest in mynde”), and this division into parts, native to allegory, is also meant to image another kind of dying: that which comes to the old, who do lose these things slowly, remorselessly. The frenzied movement here and there that we see in the platea is ultimately that of the soul of any man, whatever his age, as it struggles to free itself from man's body and world's time in order to mount to eternity. That ascent alone is the pilgrimage named so often in this play.

Patristic commentary on the master's journey can help explain another aspect of the play that exhibits a parallel richness of meaning. The action's place in historical time is allegorically as ambiguous as is the duration of the dying, and the play's movement from a double to a single time is one of its finest artistic strategies. Because the play concerns a single figure called Everyman—printed by Cawley, quite properly, as one word with a capital E—it speaks of death as it may come to any one of us, individually, at any time. The play's historical moment is in that sense a perpetual present, not tied down to history. But simultaneously a specific historical time is also addressed which is nothing less than Doomsday, the general death that will befall all those still living at the end of the world. We are implicated collectively as well as individually, for there is a steady, sustained ambivalence of pronoun in God's opening speech: Everyman is spoken of as both singular and plural in number.20 I shall italicize the alternation:

Euery man lyueth so after his owne pleasure,
And yet of theyr lyfe they be nothynge sure.
I se the more that I them forbere
The worse they be fro yere to yere.
All that lyueth appayreth faste;
Therefore I wyll, in all the haste,
Haue a rekenynge of euery mannes persone;
For, and I leue the people thus alone
In theyr lyfe and wycked tempestes,
Veryly they will become moche worse than beestes,
For now one wolde by enuy another vp ete;
Charyte they do all clene forgete.
I hoped well that euery man
In my glory sholde make his mansyon,
And therto I had them all electe …

(ll. 40-54)

When God gives his order to Dethe:

Go thou to Eueryman
And shewe hym, in my name,
A pylgrymage he must on hym take,

(ll. 66-68)

we seem to be safely back in the singular; but Dethe's answer again allows no one to escape:

Lorde, I wyll in the worlde go renne ouer-all
And cruelly out-serche bothe grete and small.

(ll. 72-73)

The ambiguity is present even earlier in the opening speech of the Messenger, which denies the audience any certainty about the kind of death-and-judgment play they will see:

For ye shall here how our Heuen Kynge
Calleth Eueryman to a generall rekenynge.

(ll. 19-20)

A listening audience cannot tell whether “Everyman” is written as one word or two, just as the word “general” can mean both “comprehensive” (a man giving a full account of his life) and “collective” (all men, the general) brought to judgment. The ambiguity is no accident: I do not know when I will die: we do not know when, as a race, we will have exceeded the patience of God.

The text provides for—indeed, subtly ensures—a kind of staging that will carry this meaning. The Messenger calls out from the platea: give audience to the play, hear what God has to say. God appears above to talk about what he sees—“euery man” in his sin; and for the first part of his speech at least, it seems clear that a character called Everyman should not be evident or distinguishable from the rest of the audience. The audience itself is the first “euery man” that God names: it is what is in his view, and what therefore he must be understood to order Dethe to summon. When Dethe cries “Loo, yonder I se Eueryman walkynge,” “Eueryman, stande styll” (ll. 80, 85) the leading actor is designated, but until then he belongs in the audience, anonymous, unexceptional. The actor might well be directed to begin making his way easily and gracefully toward an exit just before the summons comes, for we live as though such matters hold no interest, cannot concern our own life. Only when Death names us directly do we take any notice, and then, like Everyman, bewildered and unready, it is in the broken rhythms of “What, sente to me?” Reluctantly Everyman will acknowledge that summons—up to this point ambiguous—in the name of us all, for he is at once our likeness and our brother.

Neither the ars moriendi nor the faithful-friend analogues can offer any explanation for this doubled pronoun of address, this dual sense of time. They concern a man's death, that is all. But the parable of the talents does exhibit this same allegorical doubling of significance. The man gone on a pilgrimage to a far country is Christ, and the parable speaks of what will be required when he returns, at the Second Coming, which is Doomsday. Gregory explains it so:

For when the judge will come, he will ask from each of us as much as he gave. Therefore, so that each one may be sure of giving a reckoning when the Lord returns, he should think fearfully every day of what he has received. For, lo, the day is near when he who went on a journey to a far land will return. For he who left this earth on which he was born did indeed as it were go away to a far country; but he will surely return, and demand a reckoning for the talents.21

This understanding of the parable's “moment” must be the source of the darker, more apocalyptic overtones of God's opening speech in the play. Until the very last of its forty-two lines there is no mention of death, or of pilgrimage or journey, nor is any clear priority given the singular pronoun. We hear instead about sin and justice and a general reckoning. It is the language of the master returned. Only in the command given Dethe, at line 68, is it clear this play will concern a rehearsal of the Final Day, that its subject is that individual judgment at any individual death which will be formally recapitulated at the Day of Doom.22

These, then, are some ways in which attention to the parable can enable a closer and more accurate description of certain aspects of the play than has perhaps been readily available before. Let me choose just one more instance, last in my sequence, but far from least: the character and function of Good Dedes.

The problem is not one of any substantial misunderstanding. We see Good Dedes go into the grave with Everyman; we honor the fact that she alone does not desert him; and, in a general sense, we understand why. But the parable of the talents can allow us to name that reason with greater precision. It seems likely Jerome's use of opera furnished her name, Good Dedes, but her specific function in the play derives from another part of the parable. She is the crucial part of the reckoning Everyman must make, the spiritual profit, the increase, which God demands of his servants when he calls back the talents and hears the accounts. The reckoning concerns lucrum spirituale, and the servant cast into exterior darkness is he who hides his talent in the earth, becoming thereby unprofitable in the economy of God's love and man's salvation. Good Dedes in the play, we may say simply and surely, is the profit on Everyman's total endowment: on his beauty, strength, reason, senses, friends, kindred, goods.

And in a manner again intrinsic to the parable, which speaks as though literal riches were its subject, the play creates a special relationship between Goodes and Good Dedes. There is on the one hand, however peculiar to the English language, the close verbal link between their names. And there is also a close emblematic relationship. Both are initially discovered prostrate and unable to move: Goodes because it is stacked, trussed, locked in chests, sacked in bags (ll. 393-97), as a talent hoarded and hidden rather than put out for use; and Good Dedes because she is buried in earth (“Here I lye, colde in the grounde”) and fettered by sin (ll. 486-88). These parallels suggest what the Fathers declare explicitly and what the play itself will later make clear: that the one must become the other; that goods (here standing in for all of the talents) must become good deeds.23 Dethe, in his opening summary of what we will see, offers one of those synonyms so oddly characteristic of this play, giving a character a name other than that he ordinarily bears. Everyman will dwell in hell forever, he tells us, “Excepte that almes be his good frende” (l. 78). Later, the play will explore in action the logic of that oblique naming. After Everyman has returned from Confession, he makes of his last will and testament his best Good Deed, adding to (and defining the nature of) those few earlier good deeds his penance has set free to walk again:

Now herken, all that be here,
For I wyll make my testament
Here before you all present:
In almes / halfe my good I wyll gyue with my handes twayne
In the way of charyte with good entent,
And the other halfe styll shall remayne
In queth, to be retourned there it ought to be.

(ll. 696-702)

What is rightfully his—one half of his goods—he leaves to the poor in alms. What he has gained wrongfully—the other half—he will have restored to those he took from. He makes restitution, and he performs through his “almesse” the seven works of charity—those actions which alone can insure man's salvation at the Day of Doom and which are named by Christ in the verses that immediately follow the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. They are those good deeds to the poor and wretched which cannot be done generously without doing them to Christ: “To fede the hungry; to gyf the thirsty drynke; to clethe the nakyd; herber the howsles; to viset the seke; to viset prisonners; bery the ded.”24 Those deeds are the medieval meaning of “almesse,” whether accomplished by one's own hand or by a legacy to the church. “As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:31-46). Everyman has come a long spiritual way from that earlier attempt to put his Goodes to use, when he sought to buy off Dethe for “a thousande pounde” (l. 122).

This same passage affords a second instance of the way the parable of the talents, within medieval tradition, seems to have gathered to itself many like or nearby things. Everyman's last will and testament derives almost word for word from Saint Luke's story of Zacheus, a rich man of Jericho and a sinner, in whose house Jesus announces he will stay. The respectable people murmur against it:

But Zacheus, standing, said to the Lord: Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have wronged any man of any thing, I restore him fourfold.


Jesus said to him: This day is salvation come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham.


For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.

(Luke 19:8-10)

The speech of Zacheus above must be the ultimate source of Everyman's almsgiving and restitution, whatever medieval handbooks for priests may stand between. This ultimate indebtedness, so far as I know, has never been noted; but more interesting from our present point of view is the fact that Luke's version of the talents follows immediately.

Although in this play Confession is initially spoken of as a “clensynge ryuere,” a “gloryous fountayne” that can wash away sin (ll. 536, 545), the dialogue soon moves from that imagery into a long prayer spoken by Everyman, rehearsing his sins and asking mercy (ll. 581-618). At the end of it, Good Dedes is at last enabled to move. The Book of Vices and Virtues, a fourteenth-century English translation of the immensely influential Somme le Roi, discusses the sacrament of penance in ways helpful here and very closely related to the parable of the talents. It says that man should think of his Holy Confessor as God's Bailiff, conducting (and, through the sacrament, clearing) a preliminary rendering of accounts, of all of our “receites” and “dispences.”25 Good Dedes, free to move, will carry the account book, for she is what it records:

EVERYMAN:
Good Dedes, haue we clere our rekenynge?
GOOD Dedes:
Ye, in dede, I haue it here.

(ll. 652-53)

It is now clarified by penance of all except good deeds—the spiritual profit he will present as evidence of an (ultimately) faithful stewardship of talents entrusted for a time and now recalled. And in his own hand, with equal symbolic force, Everyman bears the cross—the sign of that one good deed man could not accomplish on his own, sufficient to remedy Adam's sin. In two of the Gesta Romanorum versions of the faithful friend story, the third friend (more commonly identified as Good Deeds or Charity) is Christ himself, the friend willing to die to prevent his friend's dying.26 Without the sacrifice, no account books kept on earth could ever win grace. V. Wyttes notes this crucial fact after Everyman's visit to Priesthode for the sacraments:

Peas! For yonder I se Eueryman come,
Whiche hath made true satysfaccyon.

(ll. 769-70)

It names the change as though Everyman were its agent; but of course the facts are otherwise. Christ alone could make true satisfaction for sin—He is the great restitution—but it is available to any man through the sacrament of the altar. Everyman makes satisfaction in the only way possible for man fallen and forlorn: he satisfies justice by accepting Christ's body into his own. That assent and mystical incorporation win him heaven at the end. The third chapter of The Boke of the Craft of Dying advises as a medicine against despair that the dying man be helped to say:

The deth of oure lord Ihesu Crist I put betwene me and all myn euell meritis, and the merite of this worthi passione I offre for the merite that I shuld haue had and alas I haue it not; Sey also: Lord put the deth of oure lord Ihesu Criste be-twene me and thi ryghtwysnes.27

From this medieval Christian truth derives the power of the penultimate stage action: Good Dedes and the account book, Everyman and the cross of Christ. The union is emblematic. They go into the grave together, for the lack of either would destroy the hope of heaven. Having learned to wish to die, Everyman has learned the highest lesson of the art of dying well: “I go before there I wolde be. God be our gyde” (l. 780). The play now moves swiftly to its end as all except Good Dedes fall away at the grave's edge. Everyman commends his soul to God, asks to be saved at the Day of Doom, and is received above to the sound of heavenly singing. An angel speaks to him, “Come, excellente electe spous, to Iesu!” It is equivalent to the parable's “Enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

All this would seem to indicate that some knowledge of the parable of the talents, and the commentary that grew up around it, can offer important help to our understanding of the play. For certain central facts, it has claim to be the necessary cause; and if that is granted, it becomes (in the technical sense) an adequate cause for other characters, events, and actions of the play. But the question of external probability remains. Evidence is needed that this Death-and-Doomsday subject was elsewhere and in important places conceived in terms of the parable of the talents: that the conjunction of the two would have seemed natural to a late fifteenth-century dramatist and readily comprehensible to some reasonable portion of his audience.

If space were available to sketch the history of the parable and its influence on medieval vernacular literature, one might begin by looking at the bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc, written in Anglo-Norman in 1210 or thereabouts, which uses the parable significantly; or at that same author's Le Besant de Dieu, where the talents provide the governing idea for the entire poem.28 But later evidence will serve our present purposes better. The most important link between Doomsday and the parable of the talents in popular medieval tradition is the Speculum humanae salvationis—one of the most important books of the later Middle Ages, and, along with the Biblia pauperum, one of the two most popular versions of sacred history read as a series of typologically related events. The Speculum was written in 1324, and was so widely disseminated that no census has ever been attempted of all of its surviving examples. (Lutz and Perdrizet, whose two-volume study29 remains the most important work on the subject, knew of 205 Latin and Latin-German manuscripts, nearly 80 of them fully illustrated.) The text was translated into German, French, English, Dutch, and Czech. It became one of the most popular block books, again with extant examples beyond numbering. Granted the close relationship that existed between Everyman and Elckerlijc, we might note the fact of translation into both English and Dutch; and we might recall as well that the Netherlands was a great center of block-book printing.

The Speculum concerns us because in it, the Last Judgment is prefigured by (1) the parable of the talents, (2) the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, and (3) the writing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast. In the block books and the illuminated manuscripts, the four are most often depicted in a series spread across two pages, with their texts below, and the Last Judgment at the extreme left.30 Christ is seated on an arc in the heavens, displaying his wounds, the lily and a two-edged sword emerging from his mouth; Mary and John kneel on either side of him, and the dead arise from their graves below. Directly alongside this picture is shown the parable of the talents, with the reckoning completed and the unprofitable servant bound or being led out to torture.31 The influence of this work upon the visual arts was very considerable; it would have made the relationship I postulate between parable and play one that would have been more easily accessible to contemporary audiences (even the illiterate) than it is to us now. My evidence from the Fathers indicated that the parable was understood in terms of Doomsday. The present evidence makes it clear that the converse was also true, and via the block books well into the sixteenth century, Doomsday was thought of in terms of the parable of the talents.

There are intermediate works that should be looked at in detail but here can only be mentioned. A late fifteenth-century Scots poem, “The Thrie Tailes of the Thrie Priests of Peblis,” offers evidence closely contemporary with Everyman that the talents version of the crisis survived, even though many of the analogues in between name it only in a generalized way as “being in peril of death.” The Scots poem, like these others, never uses the word “talents,” but it does specify the precise reckoning required by the King of Kings (identified so in the tale's second line):

Thus but [i.e., without] delay befoir him to compeir.
And with him count and give reckning of all
He had of him al tyme baith grit and small.(32)

And from the fourteenth century in England, there is a remarkable example of all these traditions flourishing together, clustered around the idea of the talents. In one of the Middle English sermons edited by Ross, there is narrated a version of the faithful-friend story that has never been formally noticed in Everyman criticism.33 It is used as an exemplum on the theme Redde quod debes—“Yelde that thou owest”—but between the first statement of the text and the narration of the story there intervenes a most elaborate development of theme, subsidiary theme, and illustration. It demonstrates most vividly how the idea of the talents as such subsumed material from all three parables I spoke of earlier. One hears first of the unmerciful servant of Matthew 18, who owed a debt of ten thousand talents, after which the other parable of the talents is narrated. Luke is the version cited—quite properly, for the synonym “besauntes” is used for talents, and the unprofitable servant hides his talent in a napkin rather than in the ground—but it details an unequal distribution of talents, using the 5-2-1 sequence Matthew's gospel alone provides. The preacher then goes on to quote the speech of Zacheus (again from Luke) that furnishes Everyman his last will and testament. He generalizes from it: “than it semeth well here-by that euery man is bondon to peye is dette of the goodes that God hath sende hym,” and after speaking of alms-deeds and their necessity, he names Christ as man's ultimate and only way of settling his debt with God. The preacher then—and only then—goes on to narrate the story of the three friends, one of whom alone is faithful. There is no other text I know that shares so many of the materials the dramatist of Everyman used in his turn.

These intermediate links testify to the continuity of the tradition; and some later proof, of an oddly circumstantial kind, can take us further into the sixteenth century. Our text of Everyman depends chiefly upon two early editions printed by John Skot which survive complete. Two other editions, printed by Richard Pynson, are extant only in fragmentary form, one of them dated about 1510-25 and the other about 1525-30. The year 1525 links both guesses,34 though guesses, of course, they remain. But it is interesting to find Pynson, in the following year, 1526, publishing a treatise called The Pylgrimage of Perfection, whose seventh chapter of the first book concerns God's gifts to man:

god wyll / that such gyftes and graces that he hath frely and without deseruyng gyuen to men / should nat be taken in vayn: but whan he cometh to the yeres of discrecion / & hath the vse of reason / he shuld labour and exercise hymselfe in them: for they be the talentes that god hath lent to man in this lyfe: of the whiche he wyll aske moste streyt accounte in the daye of iudgement.35

We have here what I called earlier the essential verbal matrix of the play of Everyman; and, as with the Lydgate verses quoted then, one further word, “talents,” which is the explanation of the rest. If Everyman was indeed written in the 1480s, this treatise is later by some forty years: but the printed editions (which are all that remain) testify at the very least to its popularity in the early decades of the sixteenth century. This evidence suggests that Richard Pynson, or anyone reading both of these works from his press, would surely have understood the parable of the talents to be the scriptural text underlying Everyman. On the basis of evidence already put forward, they would almost equally surely not have been the first to do so.

I have one final reason, perhaps stronger than all the others, for thinking that. As noted before, Barlaam and Ioasaph, a Greek work of the eleventh century, has long been recognized as the earliest source of the (Christianized) faithful-friend story, but since there are many intermediate versions of the same, Everyman scholarship has tended to concern itself with those that are later in time and nearer in place. This is quite proper: no one would wish to claim for the dramatist direct knowledge of an early Greek original. It was, indeed, the lat version I turned to in my research. But it offers a most striking confirmation of the reading I had reached, and have so far been putting forward, on other grounds. For the Fifth Apologue of that work, the ultimate source of our story, names the crisis confronting the man who had three friends in this way:

Now one day he was apprehended by certain dread and strange soldiers, that made speed to hale him to the king, there to render account for a debt of ten thousand talents [ταλάντων].

In the end it is only the neglected third friend,

the company of good deeds,—faith, hope, charity, alms, kindliness, and the whole band of virtues, that can go before us, when we quit the body, and may plead with the Lord on our behalf, and deliver us from our enemies and dread creditors, who urge that strict rendering of account in the air.36

In short, the story which gives to Everyman its most distinctive action and shape—the testing of friends—in its earliest Christian version explicitly works from the idea of the talents. The Greek author takes the figure ten thousand from Matthew 18: it makes a striking beginning, and all preliminaries can be avoided by simply announcing a call to repay a huge debt. But Matthew 18 contributes nothing except that specific number. For the rest, we are dealing with the meaning of the talents as defined by those several centuries of patristic commentary on Matthew 25 that preceded this eleventh-century narrative. Without that implicit understanding of what the debt involves, “the company of good deeds” and “the whole band of virtues” would make no sense as a way of explaining the third and faithful friend.

Should there be any doubt that the scriptural sense of “talent” is alive in his pages, the author's introduction to the whole work can put it to rest:

So I too … heedful of the danger hanging over that servant who, having received of his lord the talent, buried it in the earth, and hid out of use that which was given him to trade withal, will in no wise pass over in silence the edifying story that hath come to me. … It readeth thus.37

The Jesuit scholar, Jean Sonet, in a two-volume study of Barlaam and Ioasaph and its transmission, names a normative medieval Latin version, of which sixty-two manuscripts are known to him: its features include both the debt of ten thousand talents and praise of the third friend as returning with usury (that is, with spiritual profit) such small kindness as had been shown him.38 Again, the second of these details makes sense only in relation to the later parable. It cannot derive from Matthew 18.

Whether the talents survive as an explicit detail in any given version, or whether they have gone underground, as in the Golden Legend, here translated by Caxton, “And it happed so that this man was in grete perylle of his lyf and was somoned tofore the kynge,”39 in either case it seems clear that this parable continued to be the explanation of that action and its deepest controlling logic, from the eleventh century well into the sixteenth.

What happens on stage in no way looks like visual representations of the parable as they are found, say, in the Speculum humanae salvationis, where it is usual for two servants to be shown presenting coins or purses, while the third is bound and punished.40 Instead the stage is occupied by allegorical personages who are explicitly, denotatively, what those coins signify, with Everyman and his account books at their center. He is engaged in a different literal action—the testing of friends—with the result that the symbols and referents of the parable have perforce been recombined, shaped into something new, and no single patristic commentary has been used with perfect consistency or as a whole. But Everyman offers in reckoning still his Good Dedes and the cross of Christ. We know that the first Christian redactor of that testing-of-friends story had the talents in mind; they were his reason for telling it, and determined its moral. When a version of that story, probably not much longer than its original, came into the hands of a fifteenth-century dramatist, the parable and its commentaries seem once again to have provided clues and indications as to how that brief exemplum might be expanded into a rich and complex work of art. His procedures were eclectic, certainly. His concern was to make a play potent to move a popular audience, not to transmit lecture notes on the Fathers, and so he used what seemed useful, governed only by the need to make of those old materials something strong and stageable and new, at once dramatically coherent and doctrinally correct.

We do not see the parable staged, but unless we would ignore the fact that ideas have histories and that drama involves words spoken—uses words because it is interested in ideas more complex than dumb shows can manage—then we may find that the text that lies behind this play is like the soil beneath a rich carpet of green grass: it has a great deal to do with everything we do see that is substantial, pleasing, and alive. And it can help us see it better, for it invites a closer attention to the actual language of the play, permits a more precise definition of what is underway at any given moment, and—not least—allows us to apprehend more clearly the play's essential unity of action.

For modern audiences, Everyman is perhaps most moving, most successful, in its “tragic” action—its imitation of how a man dies. We are more than ever in search of an ars moriendi, having abandoned the medieval kind. But the other part of the play, its rising action—that which moves toward joy and reconciliation and salvation—has its own power and special conviction still, if only because once that was where the deepest truth was known to reside. For a medieval audience this “play of holy dying” was most urgently a play about holy living, an ars vivendi atque moriendi. The parable of the talents in no small part was responsible for that.

Notes

  1. Everyman, ed. A. C. Cawley (Manchester, 1961); hereafter cited as “Cawley.” All references to the play are to this edition. The possible priority of the Dutch Elckerlijc over the English Everyman is of no real consequence to this paper, and I have not thought it necessary to rehearse that problem here. If Everyman is indeed a translation from the Dutch, it is a fully achieved translation; its audiences would not have been aware they were watching a foreign play. I am concerned with the meaning of the action and the words which describe it for an English audience.

  2. For “rekenynge” see lines 20, 70, 99, 106, 113, 137, 147, 160, 333, 375, 419, 511, 529, 652, 865, 914; for “accounte,” lines 244, 336, 376, 406, 420, 493, 551, 580, 916. And cf. “my wrytynge” in line 187.

  3. Cawley's note to line 104 (p. 31) relates such language to the verses on the bailiff in Lydgate's translation of the French Dance of Death poem. But there, terms such as “assise,” “sommended,” “to yefe a-comptes” are used simply as a witty play on the bailiff's own profession. It is too particular, and too late in date, to offer a source for this kind of language. See The Dance of Death, ed. Florence Warren, with an introduction by Beatrice White, EETS e.s. 181 (London, 1931), p. 36 (Ellesmere MS version).

  4. Minor devils were sometimes thought of as recording man's sins, sometimes in a slightly comic context, as in the Doomsday pageant of The Towneley Plays, ed. George England and Alfred W. Pollard, EETS e.s. 71 (London, 1897), esp. pp. 371-79, or in exempla concerning Saint Brice (for several references, see V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi [Stanford, 1966], pp. 140 and 299, n. 43). More often, this is treated gravely, as in the ars moriendi block-book illustration of how dying men may be tempted to despair. It shows a devil at the deathbed, holding up a large bill-of-writing and a scroll which says Ecce peccata tua. See the facsimile Ars moriendi, ed. W. Harry Rylands, Holbein Society (London, 1881). The drama's Everyman must present his own account book; it is a different tradition altogether.

  5. See also ll. 57, 437-41. Words signifying something “lent” occasionally occur in connection with the fifth temptation named by the ars moriendi, that of family and temporal things. See, for instance, Ratis Raving and Other Moral and Religious Pieces, ed. J. Rawson Lumby, EETS 43 (London, 1870), pp. 5-6. But this most probably derives from the parable of the talents, and should not be regarded as an ultimately independent source.

  6. The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, pt. 1, EETS e.s. 107 (London, 1911), p. 337 (ll. 217-24).

  7. For an introduction and bibliographical guide to the literature of the ars moriendi, see Sister Mary Catharine O'Connor, The Art of Dying Well (New York, 1942).

  8. See The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom … on the Gospel of St. Matthew, trans. Sir George Prevost (London, 1885), pt. III, pp. 1041-42; see also pp. 1027-28. Chrysostom died in 407.

  9. In Patrologiae cursus completus: Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844-64); hereafter cited as P.L. For Rabanus Maurus, Commentariorum in Matthaeum (written c. 822-26), see vol. 107, col. 1095.

  10. Gregory the Great (c. 540-604), XL Homiliarum in Evangelia, P.L. 76, col. 1109.

  11. Chrysostom, pp. 1041-42.

  12. For the pseudo-Bede, see In Matthaei Evangelium Expositio, P.L. 92, col. 109. Paul the Deacon (c. 720-800) in his Homiliarius, P.L. 95, cols. 1554-55, lays distinctive emphasis on skills in the various arts and crafts. For the Glossa ordinaria, see P.L. 114, col. 166.

  13. Hilary of Poitiers (c. 315-67), Commentarius in Matthaeum, P.L. 9, cols. 1061-63.

  14. Rabanus Maurus, De Universo (c. 844), P.L. 111, col. 79.

  15. Saint Jerome (c. 342-420), Commentaria in Evangelium S. Matthaei, P.L. 26, col. 186. In the pseudo-Jerome Expositio Quatuor Evangeliorum: Matthaeus, P.L. 30, col. 559, the endowments are distinguished less clearly: quinque sensus, intellectus et operatio, intellectus alone. For Isidore (c. 560-636), see P.L. 83, col. 124, and for Rabanus, see P.L. 111, col. 79. They both offer the Five Books-Two Testaments-Grace interpretation as well.

  16. Lawrence V. Ryan, in a distinguished essay, “Doctrine and Dramatic Structure in Everyman,” Speculum, XXXII (1957), 722-35, discusses this question among others, and makes a strong case for the “acknowledge” interpretation. But I take the fact that the word appears only as a noun or proper name to be crucial; in that form, and in the absence of contextual limitation, it is unlikely to have been understood as “acknowledgment.” Note too that Knowledge is introduced to Everyman in response to his request for “counseyll” (l. 516); later he asks to be given “cognycyon” (l. 538) about where to go to Confession. Knowledge is the answer to both, and would seem to be synonymous with them. See Helen S. Thomas, “The Meaning of the Character Knowledge in ‘Everyman,’” Mississippi Quarterly, XIV (1961), 3-13, for a summary (with full references) of scholarship devoted to this problem, and a useful contribution to it. She also concludes, for reasons other than those outlined above, that Knowledge is a “Wisdom-figure.”

  17. See ll. 732, 737-39, on the need to go beyond sense evidence.

  18. For “pylgrymage” see ll. 68, 146, 331, 550, 565, 629, 673, 784, 818; for “iourney,” ll. 103, 141, 242, 247, 259, 268, 279, 295, 363, 464, 495, 641; for “vyage,” ll. 415, 674, 782. At l. 566, Penance is described briefly as “this vyage,” and an awkward parallel construction at ll. 141-42 can be easily misread; but the subject everywhere else is unequivocally the soul-journey.

  19. The Holy Bible … made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers, 4 vols., ed. Rev. Josiah Forshall and Sir Frederic Madden (Oxford, 1850), IV, 70-71, 210-11.

  20. R. W. Zandvoort, “Everyman—Elckerlijc,” in Études Ánglaises, VI (1953), 1-15, has briefly remarked on this fact (see p. 3).

  21. Gregory the Great, P.L. 76, col. 1109.

  22. See Cawley's note to l. 885. Lines 259-61 confirm that Doomsday is not yet, but to come.

  23. See especially ll. 431-34. Cf. “A Poem of Goods,” ed. A. G. Rigg, A Glastonbury Miscellany of the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1968), pp. 65-66.

  24. British Museum MS Add. 37049, fol. 55 (an English miscellany from the first half of the fifteenth century), names them so on a tree of the works of mercy. The Doomsday plays of the Corpus Christi cycles stage an inquiry into these deeds as their major action.

  25. The Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. W. Nelson Francis, EETS 217 (London, 1942), p. 174. Also of interest are pp. 68-92, 212-15.

  26. The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, ed. S. J. H. Herrtage, EETS e.s. 33 (London, 1879), pp. 131, 132. Lines 778-80 make it clear that Everyman now bears in his hands a cross.

  27. “The Boke of the Craft of Dying,” in Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle … and His Followers, 2 vols., ed. Carl Horstmann (London, 1895, 1896), II, 413.

  28. For the Bestiaire, see the edition by Robert Reinsch (Leipzig, 1890), p. 374 (ll. 3469 ff.), or the translation by George Claridge Druce (Ashford, Kent, 1936), pp. 94 ff. For the Besant de Dieu, see the edition by Ernest E. Martin (Halle, 1869). “Besant” derives from the Latin bysantium, meaning a Byzantine coin; the Wycliffe Bible uses it as an English synonym for “talent” as well. On these works by Guillaume, see M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (Oxford, 1963), pp. 207-8, 228-29.

  29. Speculum humanae salvationis, 2 vols., ed. J. Lutz and P. Perdrizet (Mulhouse, 1907-9). They name Matthew 25 as the text most important to the passage, while noting that “dans Luc les talents deviennent des mines. C'est de mines que parle le Speculum” (I, 233). For the Latin text, see I, 82; for the French translation made by Jean Mielot in 1448, see I, 156-57. On the Dutch translations, see I, 104. A fifteenth-century English translation was edited by Alfred H. Huth for the Roxburghe Club, vol. 118 (London, 1888), as The Miroure of Mans Salvacionne; see pp. 137-38. M. R. James and Bernhard Berenson edited a facsimile volume of a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript, Speculum humanae salvationis (Oxford, 1926), with valuable introductions. Other facsimile editions have been made by J. P. Berjeau (London, 1861) and by Ernst Kloss, 2 vols. (Munich, 1925).

  30. See the Kloss facsimile, p. 62.

  31. Its text is based on the Luke version of the parable, but it has on either side of it pictures and texts that name Matthew 25 as their source; and sometimes, as in Pierpont Morgan MS 385, a fifteenth-century Dutch manuscript, Matthew 25 and Luke 19 are both named as sources to the talents picture. Elsewhere, as in the Dutch block book edited in facsimile by Kloss, Matthew 18, Matthew 25, and Apocalypse 20 are named as sources to the first two pictures, without Luke 19 being named at all. Luke is correctly cited more often than not, but this is evidence again of all three parables being treated almost as though they were one.

  32. In David Laing, Early Popular Poetry of Scotland and the Northern Border, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (London, 1895), I, 159 (ll. 1032-34); see also ll. 1104-5 and 1179-80. For later uses of the talents in poetry, see, e.g., Milton's sonnet on his blindness, and Dr. Johnson's verses “On the Death of Mr. Robert Levet.”

  33. Cawley, p. xix, discusses one analogue in Middle English Sermons, ed. W. O. Ross, EETS 209 (London, 1940), pp. 86 ff., but not the one on pp. 36 ff., which I describe here. Ross's list of analogues is in a note to this first version, and since Cawley directs the reader to that list, it seems unlikely he overlooked it entirely.

  34. See Cawley, p. ix.

  35. The Pylgrimage of Perfection, printed by Richard Pynson (1526), S.T.C. 3277, p. 20v; italics mine. Wynkyn de Worde also published the work, in 1531, S.T.C. 3278, pp. 12-12v.

  36. [St. John Damascene], Barlaam and Ioasaph, ed. and trans. G. R. Woodward and H. Mattingly (Loeb Classical Library, 1914) reprinted with an introduction by David Marshall Lang (1967), pp. 192-99. The attribution of authorship to Saint John Damascene has been discredited. For a detailed study of the history of this facinating work, see Lang's introduction to his translation of a Georgian version of the same name, The Wisdom of Balahvar (London, 1957), pp. 11-65.

  37. Barlaam and Ioasaph, p. 5.

  38. Le Roman de Barlaam et Josaphat, 2 vols. (Namur and Paris, 1949, 1950), I, 37-40, 74-88.

  39. Quoted by Cawley, p. xviii.

  40. The works cited in note 29 name or reproduce a good many illustrations to the parable. Some others seen in manuscript are perhaps worth listing: Bodley MS Laud Misc. 165, fol. 399v and fol. 460v (William of Nottingham's Commentary on the Gospels); Bodley MS Douce 204, fol. 40 (a Speculum); British Museum MS Royal 15 D. v., fol. 173 (Gregory's Homilies); and four MSS of the Speculum at the Pierpont Morgan Library: MS M.140, fol. 42v; MS M.385, fol. 42v; MS M.766, fol. 61v; MS M.782, fol. 74.

[Reprinted from Sandro Sticca, ed., The Medieval Drama (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1971), by permission of author and publisher. Copyright 1971 by the State University of New York Press.]

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